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I admire Pedro Almodóvar all the more after watching the Argentinian portmanteau movie Wild Tales—you have to applaud his generosity in supporting a filmmaker who can do in-flight farce so much better than he does. Seeing the credit for Almodóvar’s production company El Deseo at the front of Damián Szifrón’s film, then realizing that its first sequence is set on an airplane, I suffered a flashback to the Spanish director’s dreadful 2013 airline farce I’m So Excited!...

Eight Diagram Pole Fighter (83): Interrupted by the mid-production death of its star, Alexander Fu Sheng, Liu Chia-liang’s darkest case study of martial arts-inflected psychosis begins with one of the weirdest battle-as-ballet showpieces in the director’s career: the costume cues will have you swearing you’re watching Santa’s elves facing off against a troop of killer Boy Scouts, but the choreography will have you weeping with dismay. It also features one of the most fanciful of Liu’s many great fighter-training contraptions: a pack of wooden wolves designed to be beaten with poles until their metal fangs fall out....

Black screen; the sound of a truck starting. Fade in on a drab morning, the parking lot of a roadside diner, and the truck itself, a long freighter that hauls itself into, across, and out of a Super-35 frame that, for one satisfying instant, it perfectly fills. As the engine roar recedes, a trenchcoated back looms in frame right, pauses a beat, then approaches the diner, camera following at elbow level....

“Innisfree is not a heaven,” a lifelong resident tells visiting American Sean Thornton (John Wayne) near the start of John Ford’s Irish fable—but it often looks the part. Ford’s Irishmen, with their fondness for ancestral drinking songs and folk ballads, find their greatest delight in the present when they’re mythologizing the past, and The Quiet Man, too, tends to conflate memory and myth. Its Ireland is a pastel-colored dreamscape, populated by fiery redheads, kindly drunks, and ex-boxer priests....

Some films, particularly in the nonfiction category, can be seen as omens—cautionary tales for current and/or future generations. Some of these, in turn, appear as if they were made as advisories for extraterrestrials. Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil and Michael Madsen’s Into Eternity are prime examples. Patrick Keiller’s Robinson in Ruins, the third of his “Robinson” trilogy, follows the British director’s singular strategy: heady voiceover accompanies (gorgeous) fixed-frame shots of locations and landscapes—and a few macro compositions—yielding a discursive narrative whose “characters” remain unseen....

Noon on a Thursday is an odd time to host a talk with a director as well known as Werner Herzog. But that was probably the intent: over the past few years, due to his projects being more widely released, IMDb trivia, and that clip of him getting shot in the gut during an interview, the cult around Herzog’s “wacky” public persona has slowly eclipsed his actual output. The occasion for last Thursday’s event at the Whitney Museum was Hearsay of the Soul, Herzog’s video installation in the Biennial, meaning that anyone expecting ponderous philosophical pronouncements and an encore reading of Go the Fuck to Sleep would be sorely disappointed....

Genre is the great friend of political allegory, particularly inside authoritarian states. While Chinese film of the late Nineties and Aughts preferred historical costume dramas to comment on the corruption that accompanied neo-Confucianism, many artists in the Soviet Union’s heyday seized upon the themes of disillusionment and persecution recurrent in science fiction. Aleksandr Sokurov’s Days of Eclipse adapts the Strugatsky Brothers story about a Leningrad-based astrophysicist prevented from finishing a revolutionary study by an apparent conspiracy to tell the story of a medical doctor in Turkmenia who’s being prevented from studying the relationship between religion and illness by mysterious events....

Saint Omer (Alice Diop, 2022) © Laurent Le Crabe With her recent documentary We, an observational tour of Paris that dwells in its so-called margins—the banlieues, home to many Black and brown immigrants—rather than its center, filmmaker Alice Diop crafts an anti-portrait of a nation: a collective image that emerges not from self-evident similarities but from solidarities constructed across lines of difference. Saint Omer, Diop’s already-laureled fiction debut, which won the Silver Lion at the Venice Film Festival last month, mounts yet another cinematic challenge to portraiture, interrogating the powers of both the language of the state and the camera to reveal our true selves to one another....

In director Issa López’s world, graffiti on city walls becomes a living, breathing entity, and ghosts walk among the living. The possibility that magic exists within us, and the simultaneous comfort and terror of imagination, comprises the crux of her new genre-bending film Tigers Are Not Afraid, which has captivated Guillermo del Toro, Stephen King, and many other viewers worldwide. Equally inspired by magical realism and hauntings real and imagined, the film plays like a documentary tinged with elements of the fantastical, and horror springing from unsuspecting corners....

Oscar Isaac stars as Abel Morales, the immigrant owner of a Brooklyn-based oil business whose entrepreneurial drive is clear from the opening scene when he signs the deed for a plot of land to expand his enterprise. A Most Violent Year plays out like a cost-benefit analysis of capitalism and the American Dream: Abel is willing to make bold financial risks, but he also prides himself on clean business dealings with delayed rewards....

I was reminded of the first feature you directed and starred in, On Tour, which is such a loose, chaotic film. Zand looks so uncomfortable when he’s in the supermarket, or in the lobby, when he’s not participating in the show-business world. And there’s something similar with your character in The Blue Room where he’s awakened by the passion of the affair. Yes, but it’s so tragic. I saw it yesterday night for the first time since Cannes, and it was like, “Ah, this is so dark....

Makino’s work is steeped in the avant-garde traditions of abstract animation and artisanal practice represented by the likes of Jordan Belson and Stan Brakhage, but the techniques that he employs involving digital transfers, increased frame rates, and multiple layering also push digital technology forward to the edge of its current abilities. While his films may appear transcendent and otherworldly, they are entirely composed of images from this world, such as the shimmers of light against leaves in Inter View (10), clouds dispersing in In your star (12), and a bird’s-eye view of the Tokyo cityscape in Generator (12)....

“Were you given a choice to like rats, or were they crawling their way into your bedroom every night because you grew up in a neighborhood that doesn’t have trash pickup and has been neglected by a system for 80 years?” Anthony said in our interview at the New America Diner, a restaurant and watering hole in Baltimore that hosts film-related events and screenings. (A few feet away, the director Matt Porterfield tended bar as filmmaker Zia Anger, Theo’s girlfriend, sat nearby....

Though Lady Macbeth viscerally depicts Katherine’s plight, the film maintains a distance between audience and character that might speak to Oldroyd’s interests as a theater director—he has staged Ibsen’s Ghosts as Director in Residence at the Young Vic in London and mounted productions of Beckett and Sartre around the world. Lady Macbeth is another exercise in adaptation for Oldroyd: it’s based on Nikolai Leskov’s 1865 novella Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, which had previously been tackled cinematically by Andrzej Wajda, and, most notoriously, was adapted into an opera by Dmitri Shostakovich that was banned in the Soviet Union....

Saint Omer (Alice Diop, 2022) In 2013, Fabienne Kabou, a Senegalese-French woman, left her 15-month-old daughter to drown on the banks of Berck-sur-Mer. Efforts to make sense of the act—and, crucially, of the woman responsible—proved more revealing of white, Western press and their racial preconceptions. One frequently quoted account of Kabou declared that she possessed “remarkable intelligence” but was “subject to irrational beliefs.” (One might reasonably ask who decides what beliefs are irrational, or why intelligence should ever rid anyone of ingrained convictions....

What Happened, Miss Simone? It’s long past the point of being a trend or fad. Among nonfiction filmmakers, music docs have become as ubiquitous as blue jeans. Now nearly everybody has at least one in rotation. Things reached a saturation point in 2015. The Sundance Film Festival started the year off with two high-profile submissions, HBO’s Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck and Netflix’s What Happened, Miss Simone?. In March, SXSW’s “24 Beats Per Second” sidebar introduced over a dozen more, including Mavis!...

The Image Book (Jean-Luc Godard, 2018) 2. With very few new films being released of late, a number of publications are digging through their archives and making previously print-only articles available for everyone. Among them: Sight & Sound have released this piece on Charlie Chaplin and “the art of falling” by John Berger (who passed away just a few years back—the New Yorker’s obituary a great introduction to his work and worldview)....